And also, by a wild coincidence? The birthday of Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s erstwhile lover, creepy anti-Semitic xenophobe in his middle-ish years, and slightly more subdued jerk after that. LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS WAS NOT A VERY NICE PERSON. He had an extremely difficult life BUT NOT EVERYBODY WHO HAS A BAD CHILDHOOD TURNS OUT TO BE AN ASS. This one time, Lord Alfred Douglas decided he hated all the gays everywhere and was renouncing any such tendencies on his own part, and as part of his new resolution, he SUED EVERYONE and then embarked on a MEAN CAMPAIGN OF…
18 CommentsReading the End Posts
Y’all, I’m applying for graduate school. It is stressful as hell. I’m telling you because the more people I tell, the more shaming it would be for me not to go through with it. And yes! I am using shame as a motivator! If it can beat the crap out of me every time I do something wrong, then by God I can make it work for me to do something constructive AND AWESOME. Since launching on this project of telling everyone, I have outlined my personal statement, asked for two recommendations, started an online application, and found the hard…
31 CommentsI read this book mostly in bed over several nights, while the weather outside was obligingly turning into fall. Although there are things about the cold weather that are miserable (mainly miserable for my hands and feet, which get very poor circulation as my blood is too busy keeping the rest of me warm like a furnace), they are all outweighed by the snuggly loveliness of cuddling down into your bed when it’s cold outside. (It’s not cold outside yet, by the way – just coolish and lovely – but I am anticipating the necessity of getting out my cache…
14 CommentsWe’re moving in a couple weeks (the first time since I was 9 years old), and I’ve been going through my library of 3000+ books, choosing the books that I could bear to part with and NOT have to pack to move. Which made me wonder… When’s the last time you weeded out your library? Do you regularly keep it pared down to your reading essentials? Or does it blossom into something out of control the minute you turn your back, like a garden after a Spring rain? Or do you simply not get rid of books? At all? (This…
28 CommentsReading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan for Jeane’s DogEar Reading Challenge. I am anxious about food-type books (because I love food), and I was planning to put this off to the very end of October, except someone has a hold on it at the library. So if I don’t read it by 18 October I am out of luck. 11 October 2009 8:30 PM: Exciting. My very first book about food except for Fast Food Nation, which let’s face it, I skipped a lot of that book because it gave me unhappy feelings. I start reading and am…
33 CommentsDon’t you love titles with semicolons? This one’s full name is The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. In a lot of ways, it’s like And the Band Played On – a medical mystery! The book follows a cholera epidemic in London in 1854 (the year Oscar Wilde was born!), how it began and how it spread, and how a scientist and a vicar tracked it down and discovered how it was transmitted. What had happened was that a baby girl got cholera, and her mother dumped…
8 CommentsThis is a longstanding complaint really, but I’ve been reminded of it today by Paperback Reader‘s lovely shelf of beige books. See those Salman Rushdie books? This is the source of my displeasure. Because I like Salman Rushdie quite a lot. In fact I am thinking it is probably time to read Shalimar the Clown, one of two of Rushdie’s books that I’ve been saving. I like Salman Rushdie a lot, and I like these editions of his books (link is to The Moor’s Last Sigh, the other of Rushdie’s books I’m saving for myself). But they don’t have my…
21 CommentsFor Jeane’s Dog Ear Challenge: West with the Night was the nonfiction book on an obscure topic/on a topic you don’t often read about. I had a broad selection of Jeane recommendations for this one, since she is always reading books that sound interesting but that I would never pick up on my own. West with the Night is Beryl Markham’s memoir of growing up on her father’s farm in Africa, and becoming a horse trainer, and eventually learning to fly a plane. Beryl Markham sounds like a pretty cool person, though from reading her Wikipedia article it sounds like…
14 Comments